Posted on 01/29/2006 12:49:28 PM PST by neverdem
I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.
Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.
The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.
If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy — rough, tough Bobby Kennedy — didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines who liked to quote poetry.
What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.
The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?
I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the polls?
Here's a prize example by someone named Barry Casselman, who writes, "There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008."
This supposedly pits Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, emboldened by "a string of bad news from the Middle East . . . into calling for premature retreat from Iraq," versus those pragmatic folk like Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman.
Oh come on, people — get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war — from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us daily.
You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine you have no idea what people are thinking. I'm telling you right now, Tom DeLay is going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven't got enough sense to OWN the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.
Do it all, go long, go for public campaign financing for Congress. I'm serious as a stroke about this — that is the only reform that will work, and you know it, as well as everyone else who's ever studied this. Do all the goo-goo stuff everybody has made fun of all these years: embrace redistricting reform, electoral reform, House rules changes, the whole package. Put up, or shut up. Own this issue, or let Jack Abramoff politics continue to run your town.
Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just turn on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news."
Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.
Ivins is based in Austin.
While Molly has always looked like her daddy spanked her in the face with a skillet, she has cancer, and as such, I no longer make fun of her looks, just her political opinion.
I love it when liberals turn on each other -- thanks for the post!
I agree! I think it was P.J. O'Rourke who said that he was a lefty in the '60's because that was where all of the really hot women were back then. Evidently times have changed.
" She's not likable, Mr. Snerdley. It's just that simple. She is just not likable. You think you're watching the Wizard of Oz with the monkeys in the castle. You think you're watching One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. There's nurse Ratched. Who wants to hear this screaming voice when she gets all revved up? We've played the audio sound bites of this. She starts screaming about things. Who wants to hear this? Who is inspired by it? "
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2014815,00.html
[A CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll last week found that 51% of Americans “definitely” would not vote for her and only 16% said they definitely would. Among men, 60% said they would not vote for her.]
Im actually sorry to see this. It would be so nice to see her get the party nomination and then get totally creamed in 11/08
Sometimes they put her stuff in the Arizona Republic rag. Even without it they are a bunch of idiots.
didn't know that. I'd never seen her before. Thankfully.
This morning, however, she was one of the first faces I saw when I woke. Kinda took me back under the covers a minute. I've read her ugliness in her opinions, but I failed to realize how deep-rooted it was.
I've heard stories of patriotic Americans with German surnames being harassed during World War I, but never of poor little dachshunds being persecuted. The solution would have been simple--call them badger dogs, since that's what Dachshund means in German.
Translation: "Hillary isn't enough of a fleck-mouthed demagogue." Ivins and her ilk continue to think that it's just a matter of punching their message through the mysterious barrier that's keeping it from the American public. If they scream loud enough, eventually we'll hear, they believe. The Republicans should only be so lucky as the Dems nominating someone more strident than Hillary Clinton.
"Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo..."
Far be it from me to defend Hillary Clinton, or to take her side at anytime, however what exactly did Ivens want her to say about Terri Schiavo? I can hardly believe she wanted Clinton to come out in favor of letting her live, so that leaves the option of Hillary Clinton, a woman cuckolded by her husband many, many times, to offer support to the idea that Schiavo's estranged and adulterous husband had the power to have her starved to death. Somehow I just don't think Hillary probably saw things just that way. So, she kept her mouth shut, and why shouldn't she have?
This Molly Ivens is a real moron, I don't think I've ever read anything by her before. And her stats have to be way out of wack, I seriously doubt 85% of the American people are in agreement on anything, much less raising the minimum wage.
The Democrats haven't seen a taxcut they did like. I remember back in 2001 getting a letter saying I was getting a tax rebate and I had already got my regular tax return. I was only making $6 to $7 something an hour. So much for saying I was poor. I know I wouldn't have seen that tax rebate if you know who snuck his way into the White House.
I was a few years too late for that part. By the time I reached puberty, they'd gone out and bought new bras to replace the ones they'd burnt.
In Helen Thomas and Molly Ivins case, I don't think even underwire, full support face bras coulda stopped the saggage that Father Time was gonna inflict on them.
"OK, whose @$$ did the writer pull these numbers out of?"
87.5% of all statistics are just made up to prove a point. (Plus or minus 12.5%, of course.) :-)
"I think it was P.J. O'Rourke who said that he was a lefty in the '60's because that was where all of the really hot women were back then."
That must have been the very early 1960s, probably around 1957. Unless when he said "hot" he meant "loose".
And I say that if the majority of the American people knew about/ read Senator James Inhofe's Chinagate speech -there won't be another Democrat President- for decades to come:
U S Congressional Record/Senate
June 23, 1999
pgs. S7483-S7486
The Clinton National Security Scandal and Coverup
(top right hand cornor)
Senator James Inhofe
also Alamo_Girl.com/chinagate
"Unless when he said "hot" he meant "loose"."
I suspect he meant "don't wear a bra".
I thought it was anyone not on the welfare payrolls.
Article: "Oh come on, people — get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war — from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us daily."
"The lies that led us..." makes the term "lies" so generic. Specify the lies and by whom the lies were asserted. This author has forgotten about the 9/11 terrorist attacks which is a "sin of omission" or a tacit "lie."
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